If the only thing standing in the way of you raping, stealing, and murdering people is an intangible parent figure threatening you with eternal hell, it is you who are immoral, not me. A developmental psychologist named Kohlberg divised six different stages of morality, and you must be stuck on level one: Obedience and Punishment Orientation. Usually people outgrow this during childhood, but some people are still stuck on it.
I prefer to think I’m stuck between stage 4 and 5. Somewhere between Law & Order and Social Contract Orientation. I don’t pretend to be stage 6, I’m not Gandhi or anything.
I’m somewhere around Level 4/5. Some things are sort of an unspoken tradition, and are in everyone’s best interest (Level 4). Some things are right because they are right. Some things are wrong because they are wrong (Level5). I like to think I’m clever enough to get away with things, and nobody would know or punish me, so it isn’t fear of punishment. Acting purely in self interest does not attract me because I can see beyond myself, and think about how my actions would affect other people. Being slightly(?) uninterested in whether someone else thinks I’m nice, that does not guide me much either.
(1.75, -2.36) Disagree
From a christian fundy perspective, there can be no morality based on human decisions or actions as Isaiah 64:6b states:
In other words, no action can be considered good when compared to the holy and divine measuring stick.
I am equating moral good to righteous acts.
However, the statement is: You cannot be moral without being religious.
This indicates that one can only be moral if one follows religion, flying in the face of the passage in Isaiah.
If morality can be defined by an individual(s), then they need not be compared to the divine standard and a person can be moral so long as they follow their moral system. Societies impose collective morality through the laws of the land. If someone follows a religion that practices rape and murder and the laws of the land prohibit such actions, that religion will be viewed as immoral, regardless of their personal belief system.
So if divine morality exists, we’re doomed anyway and might as well bring in our own morality to govern ourselves if only to protect us from ouselves. If divine morality does not exist, then we are left to create our own anyway for the same reasons. Either way, religion doesn’t factor in.
Economic Left/Right: 1.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.44
Clicked * Strongly Disagree *.
Concur with the OP, and also would suggest that any form of objective ethics is necessarily a stronger position than authoritarian ethics for the simple reason that such ethical principles are free to evolve and decay, and yet maintain their relevance.
Strongly disagree. A moral code is simply a guiding principle (or set of principles) that a person uses to make decisions. That code could be based on “kill or be killed”, for example, and it would still be a moral code.
The problem is that we have often defined “moral” to mean “religious”. “He has very high morals” is often another way of saying “He adheres to religious beliefs very strictly.” But that’s really a corruption of the term “moral”.
If the empathic response is genetic and is so strong as to prevent me from incurring pain and suffering on others, why do we need any theoretical framework (like Utilitarianism) to define what is “evil”.
Can’t we just define “evil” acts those which the empathic response prevents us (excluding the psychopaths) from doing?
In general, regarding the “empathic response”, it is true that even if I can get away with it, I cannot bring myself to harm others. But I assumed that this was because of the way I was brought up and this behavior was programmed into me by my upbringing. Now you say that it is actually due to hard-wiring by evolution. I looked for some cites on the empathic response, but couldn’t find any good ones. Do you have any good cites?
I think you’re right. I was thinking more along the lines of the principle in economics that everyone tries to maximize their utility, but, according to this, “Utilitarianism is a suggested theoretical framework for morality, law and politics, based on quantitative maximisation of some definition of “utility” for society or humanity.”
Nevertheless, I still think most of us operate under the principle of maximizing our utility rather than that of society.
For example, if I can save my mother or 2 strangers from a speeding train, then I will save my mother, because that maximizes my utility, even though saving the 2 strangers would maximize society’s utility. (Or maybe a better example would be saving my mother vs saving the President)
It was under this principle that I mentioned that, if an action has benefits for you, and zero negative consequences for you (you will never be caught), logically it makes sense to take this action even if it involves the suffering of others.
If you exclude the “empathic response” mentioned by SentientMeat above, there is no logical reason why causing suffering to others is something you should avoid if you will not be caught.
The only logical reason to avoid causing suffering to others is because of consequences to yourself if you get caught. But if you’re in a situation were it is impossible for you to get caught, logic provides no justification for not causing harm to others.
So, the justification must come from somewhere else: from the “empathic response”, from your religious views, or elsewhere.
Economic Left/Right: 1.25
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 0.51
Strongly Disagree
I am highly moral. I am not religious. And as some others have said, I’m beginning to feel that the terms moral and religious are become exclusive to one another.
Morality is, devoid of divine instructions, the system by which humans eke out a sense of fairness in their dealings with each other. It shades into etiquette in one direction, and into government and law in the other.
And it’s to the latter shading I’d direct people’s attention. Courts exist to mete out justice, which they supposedly do through the application of law. But when law begins to be regarded as an end in itself, what may be a decision in accordance with law may turn out to be considered as one not in accordance with justice.
Likewise, divine moral commands, presuming a Divine Lawgiver to exist (which I do, but mention as a presumption for the sake of argument in a thread where not all participants will), will therefore be moral by definition. But when one focuses on the minutiae to the exclusion of the broader and greater commandments, one has the effect that has caused several people to suggest morality and religion to be mutually exclusive – people prepared to act immorally against their fellow man on the basis that the latter is “sinning against God’s commandments,” and therefore needs to be put in his place by the the former.
Whatever. Many people who would deem themselves irreligious, though sometimes not non-spiritual, nonetheless act in a far more moral way than the True Believers who have focused on one sapling to the exclusion of the surrounding forest.
NICODEMUS2004 -2.75,-3.69 Atheist Strongly Disagree
Polycarp it is good to see you here. Your contributions make every discussion better informed. As I have stated in other Threads, I do not hold to religious views but I consider myself to be moral and ethical. My input here is by way of introduction as I intend to sit back and listen for a while
In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900), The Antichrist, section 16
I’m not suggesting that it is so mechanistically simple. You asked for a “negative consequence” and I gave a possible example: that is not to say that everybody’s response is the same, nor that there is not complex feedback between nature and nurture in the phenomenon called “empathy”, nor that empathy is solely hard-wired. There is alwys some continuum, some balance which must be found between suffering and liberty, human rights and human property. That is why an advanced utilitarian formulation of morality, or any other nonreligious formulation, is anything but a simple set of principles. One might as well ask “Why can’t we just define the law or government policy as simply what everyone wants?”.
However, neither can the empathic response be solely nurture either. After all, there must be some reason why parents give children that kind of upbringing the world over (with sad exceptions, of course). I remember this article from New Scientist last year, but there are all kinds of experimental (PDF) correlations between the empathic response and the extremely “old” emotional parts of the brain (the limbic system, which even ancient lizards had). ‘Empathy blindness’ is very definitely a disorder: we might consider that our own response is “learned”, but when confronted with an autistic child (of those same loving, teaching parents) who simply can’t “get” empathy at all, we must surely look at the brain rather than the parents.
I strongly disagree. Check out some Greek philosophy. They were, indeed, religious. They also (some of them) had a very clear line between ‘morality/virtue’ and religion. (Right now I’m thinking of Aristotle’s Nicomachian Ethics).
Others equated morality as a part of virtue. The Greek word for virtue (arete) can also be translated as ‘excellence’. Some of the Greeks (Socrates/Plato, for one) seemed to interpret that ‘excellence’ to be striving to be like the gods. It was not, generally speaking, a ‘be moral or Zeus will smite you’ outlook. This seems to be a strictly Judeo-Christian belief, and if I didn’t have to jet off to class right now, I’d say a lot more on it.
I read that as "Strongly Disagree. Religious, FTW (which means “for teh win!” in video gaming, something someone says when they get a particularly badass piece of equipment)
Does having an Omnipotent Deity on your side qualify as “get[ting] a particularly badass piece of equipment”?
Seriously, the reason that the proposition advanced in the thread title is ever held is the infamous Fallacy of Insufficient Empathy – that what is true for me must therefore be true in your life as well. For many religious people, their own having divine commandments as the source of moral behavior means that everyone ought to, and that those who do not subscribe to such divine commandments therefore have no source for moral behavior, and therefore are easily drawn to behave immorally. They cannot conceive of other sources of moral behavior than their own, so they make invalid presumptions.
